1. Field
The present disclosure relates to transmission of notifications, and more particularly, to methods and systems for concatenating notifications in a notification system.
2. Background
Businesses and governmental entities, including municipalities and schools, are ever more reliant on communicating through the mass transmission of notifications to their staff, citizens and family members of students to keep these constituencies apprized of important events, including emergencies and commerce. For example, a school principal might need to send a message to the parent of every student that the school will be immediately closed due to flooding, fire, or blizzard. Notifications with such messages might be sent by telephones, facsimiles, pagers, electronic mail (e-mail), and/or text messages. These notifications will typically vary in their degree of importance, in the number of recipients, and in the immediacy with which they must be received.
However, there currently exists a growing problem as mass notification transmission systems become more prevalent. In particular, the personnel responsible for the oversight (e.g., command and control) of various notifications typically do not know either what personnel within their own organization or personnel at other institutions and agencies may be communicating with the same message recipient, and with what information. In many such situations, messages about the same incident and to the same people are issued from different users and/or different sources. For example, a local police department might need to inform residents of a city that the next day's snowfall will require cars to be removed from the street for plowing. A fire department might need to inform residents of the city that the snowfall will be bringing extreme cold and that residents without heat in their homes should go to a shelter. Both messages may concern the same areas in the city. As another example, a ninth grade history teacher might need to inform a student's parents that a student was absent to history class, and a ninth grade art teacher might also need to inform the student's parents that the student was absent to art class.
In such situations, multiple notifications will be sent to the same recipient, often with the same or similar message in each notification. It would be desirable to deliver these messages in a uniform and efficient manner.